


down comes the hatchet on the chopping block

by ladyrose (orphan_account)



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: ( <— it’s in the form of a metaphor but I’ll tag it to be safe), Blood and Injury, Drama, Drowning, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 08:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19127911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ladyrose
Summary: After Arthur’s near fatal run in with the O’Driscoll’s, John finds himself in a position he’s never been in before.Bedside.





	down comes the hatchet on the chopping block

**Author's Note:**

> What a horrible summary, anyway,
> 
> This fic was inspired by the ever talented ‘moxie-sketches’ over on tumblr. Here’s the picture in question:
> 
> https://moxie-sketches.tumblr.com/post/183319393187/thanks-for-keep-supporting-me-i-know-im-slow-but
> 
> Thank you, Moxie, for allowing me to reference your art for this fic. I appreciate you!
> 
> For everyone else, thank you for taking the time to read this. My tumblr is ‘morgan-arthur’ if you have any comments, I take forever getting through comments on here and I don’t want to come across as cold. I enjoy hearing your thoughts and I appreciate the time you take for leaving kind words 🌺

The sunlight pooling in through the canvas flap that separated Arthur’s private quarters from the rest of the camps view did nothing in the way of warmth as John sat on the newly cleared crate, arms folded across folded knees and nose pressed firmly against his forearms.

Arthur still hadn’t moved.

In their work, truth was subjective. There were half truths and whole ones and ones that maybe, in a different light or the right pair of hands, like theirs, could be twisted into something else entirely.

And so, here was a truth. Very quiet and twice as still. Bruised and battered beyond recognition.

_He was afraid._

There was shift in atmosphere after Arthur got back. Subtle. Like when the wind changes and you get a whiff of the ocean as it passes. You know that soon, there will be a bad storm. A hurricane maybe, or a tornado. But as it stands, you don’t have time to run before it hits, so you watch the sky turn green and hail hammer away at your roof and you sit, and watch, and watch, and sit, and hope come morning it’ll have blown over...

When Micah and Dutch returned without Arthur, it had been Hosea who said something first. Ever keen, eyes going first to Micah, then dragging with an expression John couldn’t read towards Dutch where he lingered back.

“Morgan wasn’t feelin’ up to it before we even left,” Micah shrugged in dismissal. “We had our chat with Colm and went our separate ways.”

“I’m sure he’ll be back soon, Hosea,” Dutch added.

Hosea didn’t seem to buy it.

Charles had confessed to John later that evening under the coaxing of something John could only recall by taste that he didn’t either.

And then, late the following day, he returned to them.

He couldn’t remember a time when Arthur was the one hurting and he was the one sitting at his bedside.

Once, he had tried. But that was different.

Arthur had just lost his family and was the type of hurting that outwardly didn’t show, but manifested in damning ways.

Misery tended to be loud in its silence and loud in it’s vices. And Arthur chose perhaps the loudest of them all, drowning his troubles in bottles both cheap and expensive, alike only in their frequency. John knew all to well what a dependency like that looked like gone unchecked and tried—albeit awkwardly—to intervene and get him to talk, but was met with a guard and unspoken threats through looks alone that had him leaving the man be until it passed.

Or died all together.

Whichever came first. He never did find out. Wasn’t bold enough to ask.

But back then, Arthur was still... _Arthur_.

He was still wiser and stronger and he still reminded John of it every chance he got. He still snarked and rolled his eyes and ‘accidentally’ tripped John around camp. He still laughed and made bawdy jokes and the lines fanning from his eyes weren’t there, and he didn’t look so, so very tired. He never let John see him flounder for something or have a soberingly human moment. John almost forgot in his youth, silly as the thought was, that he even _was_ just a flesh and blood human like the rest of them...

“You should go see him,” Abigail had said early that morning. He looked over to her, but she wasn’t looking at him. Busy picking bits of pollen off her shawl.

He doesn’t know if he can.

He doesn’t say this to her.

So he stops Tilly as she was making her way over to his tent with breakfast, and ignored the smile and pitying sort of look she gave him as he stumbled over his question, handing him the bowl per his request and squeezing his arm.

He ignored the way Mrs. Grimshaw nodded to him in understanding when he passed her. Ignored how Molly, loitering in the opening of Dutch’s tent, back to Arthur’s wagon with a book and a fan silently slipped away across camp when he drew nearer. With a frustrated sigh, he paused long enough to undo the flap of the tent where it was pinned haphazardly above the overhang, and let it drop behind him as he stood, suddenly unaware of what to do, in Arthur’s tent.

The man in question lay nearly unrecognizable in a sea of blankets and gauze, eyes shut and swollen. John stands a moment, watching the blankets rise and fall in rhythm before he tears his eyes away to find a place to sit when a horrifying, invasive sort of thought has him fearing the rhythm will stop before his very own eyes.

So he sits.

And he waits.

“Arthur...you hungry?”

He gets a frown and a low groan as an answer.

“Probably not, huh? Not now, at least.”

He looks down at the bowl as he sits it beside Arthur’s photographs. Puts creases into his shirt sleeve to give his hands something to do.

Arthur is stock still now, and John almost wants to nudge him or ask more mundane questions to get him to do something. But he won’t. He _can’t_. And like a weight somewhere at the base of his skull and across his shoulders, he feels that foreign presence again. The same one he felt when his father died or when he were several feet up a tree, blinking through tears at the homesteaders below him.

_He was afraid._

“I’m sorry,” he starts softly. “I didn’t know. None of us knew. Hosea guessed it I think. But Micah had said...Dutch said...”

He trails off helplessly, tucking his knees up on the crate and watching Arthur sleep.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

Arthur doesn’t make any sort of noise this time.

John thinks that in and of itself is worst.

Arthur had came for him once, when John sat on a cliff edge having just went one to six with a pack of wolves. He and Javier. Whether they had been asked or not, they came. Pulled him from the edge and warded off the wolves until he was safe again.

John didn’t go for him.

He was too late.

A taste for revenge, like the aftertaste of something bitter is almost tangible in the back of the mouth, but for now, he sits.

He sits and watches, and watches, and sits.

He can afford him that.

 

 


End file.
